"What's this about?"

"We call it life."

"Why do you call it that?"

"Because its real name is unprintable."

I believe it all started when my father, Dirk Gently, aka Svlad Cjelli, aka Jane Austen, aka Man in Red Hat, became the first man ever to get pregnant.

I know. This isn't a promising beginning. But hear me out. Just for a bit.

My father, Dirk as most people called him, was a gently rotund man, an earnest if slightly insane man, and a quite unattractive man. Since he published two volumes of his adventures (under a pseudonym which I'm not going to actually mention because I'm fairly certain most of you have a good idea what it is) he of course garnered legions of female fans, all of whom would thoroughly dispute his unattractiveness— as long as he remains, to their minds, a fictional character. If they came across him in real life, they wouldn't have given him a second glance. Or, indeed, a first one, unless they happened to run over him or something. Whereupon they would of course be properly sorry as one is sorry for an unfortunate fellow creature such as a squirrel which has just been flattened by their Volvo, but not attracted at all.

Dirk— I never called him anything else; he said it was for my own protection— however, wanted to propagate. He had a legacy— wit, brains, the aforementioned insanity— and by God, or whatever the reasonable alternative was, he was an athiest up until right before he died, at which point he was heard yelling fervent apologies skyward, he was going to hand it down to his children. Or— to his child, at least, his one child. You see, after he had me, the doctors said it would endanger his health to have another, and so he was unable to supply me with a brother or a sister.

At this point you are probably fuming at the computer screen or the page or, at any rate, print, and saying, "Wait a minute— wasn't this the plot of a movie starring Arnold Schwartzenegger?"

To which I can only say, yes, unfortunately, it was. And yes, unfortunately, I have seen it. And yes, unfortunately, I still have nightmares. But there the similarity ends, I hope. I pray. And that was a movie, see, and this is reality. You can easily tell the difference. Movies have Arnold. Reality doesn't. People in California may attempt to disagree with me, but please, think about it before you do, think about it good and hard.

Plus, its not like Californians have such a fantastic grasp on reality in the first place.

But I digress. I hadn't intended this to be a political commentary, though sometimes it slips in without my even realizing it. Suffice it to say that, in need of money and rather desperate, my father sold his body for medical use before he was quite done with it. I believe it was intended as some kind of scam, but it didn't quite pan out. The medicos caught up with him, he was hauled away screaming curses— not, apparently, for the first time— and the next thing he knew, little men in white coats were waving contracts at him and injecting him with worryingly-long syringes that had worryingly-yellow liquids in them. It could have been worse— they could have tried to remove things. Instead he got implanted with me.

He said he came out of the experience with new respect for women. I should think he'd have had to, considering he didn't have any respect for them previous. Anyway, according to him, pregnancy bears a distinct resemblance to the six or seventh ring of hell. He kept craving ice cream, his feet were always swelling up, and his nightmares— usually about a great strange eagle— returned with a vengeance.

Finally though, it was over. I was born. He took one look at me and sobbed, or so the story goes. I can't contradict it, having just been born at the time.

Two days later he named me.

Lemon.

Lemon Marie James Gently.

If ever a child had an excuse to turn into a serial killer, I did. My life was set— a life of ridicule and pain and an estranged relationship with my father, as we were far too much alike to get along very well.

Then, exactly seventeen years, eleven months, and twenty days later, a space ship came down on our lawn and told me the world was going to end.